In the past few days two studies on the impact of music streaming on recorded music sales surfaced. The Country Music Association (CMA) presented study results that streaming services are more successful in fostering music sales than radio. It was reported that more than a quarter of the respondents purchased music after streaming it compared to eight percent of radio listeners. Since the CMA study is not available, the results cannot be seriously assessed. Therefore, we rely on a study of Stephen McBride, a researcher of the Science Team at Pandora Media. He testified before the U.S. Copyright Royalty Judges and presented evidence that show a positive impact on music sales. In a nutshell, he highlights that listening to a song on Pandora increases music sales be more than 2 percent – a moderate “Pandora effect”, as he called it. In following, I will analyse McBride’s findings in the so-called Music Sales Experiments that were conducted by Pandora’s science team. Learn more about it here:

In the past few years several studies on the impact of P2P music file sharing on recorded music sales were published. They came to very different and even conflicting results, as I highlighted in a 25 part blog series. A recently published study now shifts the focus from file sharing to music video online streaming. R. Scott Hiller of Fairfield University and Jin-Hyuk Kim of University of Colorado Boulder analysed the sales displacement effect of YouTube in a paper entitled “Online Music, Sales Displacement, and Internet Search: Evidence from YouTube“. They concluded that Warner Music Group sold significantly more units of its Billboard 200 albums, when the Warner content was removed from YouTube due to a conflict on licensing fees. In addition, they found no evidence that the blackout had a negative promotional effect for Warner artists.

You can read more about this study and my assessment of the results here:

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